By Dinorah Pérez-Rementería
According to literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastic emerges out of a deep state of uncertainty about the (illusionistic or realistic) nature of the artistic work. With regard to this idea, Todorov affirms that the fantastic takes place when something inexplicable happens in our world; we can not find an explanation to decipher what is going on, following the logic of the world with which we are familiar (15). Those who perceive such an occurrence will face a moment of hesitation in which they either attribute an illusionistic character to what they see so as not to challenge the real world’s laws, or they consider the episode as part of reality, allowing us to think that our world is subject to unfamiliar laws as well (Todorov 15). How can we legitimize an impossible logic in a fantastic or magic realist text?
In Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, the reader experiences “the fantastic” dilemma since the very beginning. To describe Tita’s sensitivity to onions, the narrator (Tita’s great-niece) says that she would cry and cry: “When she was still in my great-grandmother’s belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half-deaf, could hear them easily” (Esquivel 5). The scene described above may produce the reader’s first moment of hesitation about the nature of Esquivel’s novel. What is she to believe? Don’t we know that babies move and react to music, books and their mothers’ voices even before they have been born? So, why couldn’t they cry as well? But, if they did, could they actually cry so loud that a deaf person hears them? Is Tita a gifted person, with a special kind of sensitivity? Well, yes she is. Tita is sensitive to foods, not to music or books or other things. Couldn’t she have that reaction to onions, as the narrator says? The world of the characters in Like Water for Chocolate -Tita’s world in particular- is presented in great detail as if it were part of the real world, so the reader is truly forced to wonder whether there might be someone, as sensitive as she is, that could cry when still inhabiting her mother’s belly. On the other hand, we have to convince ourselves that Nacha, being deaf, could hear her.
Todorov affirms that all elements of the fantastic have links with both fiction and the literal meaning of the words (42). The fantastic literature frequently uses figurative language because it originates within that sort of speech (Todorov 45). In Like Water for Chocolate, the narrator says that Tita’s cry was once so violent that it brought on an early labor (Esquivel 5). Later she adds, “Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor” (Esquivel 6). So, again the reader has to confront two ways of seeing the scene described that would determine his experience of the fantastic. But, as Todorov affirms, if what we read describes a supernatural element and we must interpret the words in a non-literal fashion that separates us from the supernatural world, there is no room for the fantastic anymore (36). Anna Katsavos refers to the fantastic as follows: “it is an effective vehicle of subversion because it relies upon all the conventions of realistic fiction to assert that what it is telling is real, and it simultaneously undermines its own realism by introducing what is manifestly unreal” (27). For Katsavos, “the fantastic narrative depends upon the reader’s ability to recognize a familiar world, even if some of what is going on in this world deviates from what the reader accepts as normal” (27).
If the fantastic depends on the reader’s hesitation about the illusory and realistic nature of the situation described, magical realism has to do with a particular manner the supernatural is integrated into reality by an author. Edwin Williamson has put it this way: “Magical realism is a narrative style consisting of the blurring of traditional realist distinction between fantasy and reality” (Williamson in Schroeder 5). A critic like Irlemar Chiampi calls the mixture of reality and the supernatural realismo maravilloso instead of magical realism. In a study of magical realist texts, Maria Elena Angulo has argued that magical realism is treated as part of the Latin American cultural context and as part of the unconscious of its writers (Angulo 13). Magical realist texts invest in myths, legends, and rituals, collective practices that bind community together (Parkinson & Faris 3). With regards to Champi’s book O Realismo Maravilhoso, Angulo considers it important, for it defines the evolution of the forms of representation of Latin American narratives (12). In the category of “realismo maravilloso” the unusual is incorporated into reality, and there is an effect of enchantment produced by the nondisjunction of natural/supernatural and by the internal causality of the narrative text (Chiampi 59, Angulo 10).
Let us examine two fragments from Like Water for Chocolate: “That afternoon, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor and there was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack –it was used for cooking and lasted a long time” (Esquivel 6). Having informed the reader about Tita’s frenetic tendency to cry, the author introduces another magical event in a very realistic fashion. Our tears taste in fact a little salty, and they can also leave a visible mark on surfaces. Couldn’t we also have a ten-pound sack of salt at home to use for cooking that lasts a long time? So, there is a realistic logic in many parts of the phrase, which helps make the effect of enchantment (the salt used for cooking is none other than the residue that Tita’s tears left on the floor) verisimilar.
For Chiampi, the verisimilar character of the magical realist texts lies in the place where two contradictions meet, in hopes of injecting a logical quality into what is not logically verisimilar. In this regard, she says that in order for a text to legitimize its impossible logic, it has to take advantage of a specific narrative that organizes and makes words and their semantic universes accomplices of each other (Chiampi 168-169, Angulo 12). Another fragment in which there is a realistic depiction of an unreal situation, with many sensory details, is when Dr. Brown explains his grandmother’s theory for producing phosphorous.
While the fantastic works as a borderline phenomenon (Armitt 1996, 31), magical realism facilitates the fusion of possible worlds, spaces and systems that would be irreconcilable in other sorts of fiction (Parkinson & Faris 6). Armitt has argued that literary fantasies are particularly preoccupied with encoding the symbolism of the unknown and the unknowable into their narratives (1996, 39). Hallucinatory scenes and events as well as phantasmagoric characters are also used in several of the magical realist works (Parkinson & Faris 6). Faris and Parkinson have declared that “The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds –in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformations, metamorphosis, dissolutions are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or pragmatism” (6). For these authors, magical realism is an extension of realism in its concerns with the nature of reality and its presentation (Parkinson & Faris 6). They both agree with the idea that in a magical realist text, categories like mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female appear transgressed, erased, blurred and even brought together (Parkinson & Faris 6).
In Like Water for Chocolate, there are several instances in which death becomes a vehicle for life and rebirth. Pedro, for instance, somehow dies when marrying Rosaura, Tita’s sister with whom he is not in love. Yet, by agreeing to die that death, he gains a new life –that is “the chance to be near Tita, the woman he really loves” (Esquivel 38). Upon being informed of Roberto’s death, Tita also dies on the inside (her own mother thinks she is crazy), which allows her to have the opportunity to get away from home and experience how life might be like alongside Dr. Brown. Nacha’s ghost appears before Tita on many occasions, giving recipes and telling her how to help Rosaura give birth to Roberto. The phantom of Mama Elena also shows up three times at least to condemn Tita for having immoral sexual encounters with Pedro. Tita gets rid of her mother’s ghost by pronouncing the magic words -“I have always hated you” (Esquivel 200). As the narrator says, “the imposing figure of her mother began to shrink until it became no more than a tiny light” (Esquivel 200). Jorge Luis Borges, cited by Ralph Yarrow in his essay Some Thoughts on Stopping the World, wrote that “the fundamental devices of mirror/double of the fantastic, world within world, and alternative reality are structural procedures to set our reading in another mode” (Borges in Yarrow 139). For the Argentinean writer, these devices make the readers encounter other possibilities of self and reality, and they reveal the fictional/creative nature of all formulations, allowing people to read themselves out of their skins and into other mental sets –which helps them to be free from habits of thinking and perceiving (Borges in Yarrow 139).
Like Water for Chocolate is both fantastic and magical-realist. One important feature of the fantastic text lies in its temporality that translates into an immanent irreversibility. According to Todorov, readers need to go over the fantastic text, following a conventional logic of reading from start to end so as not to lose any valuable details that help in their comprehension of the causality in the narrative (49). Esquivel’s novel requires that kind of logically-ordered reading. Each chapter in the novel represents a monthly installment made up of a main food-recipe, sequences of magical-realist events and descriptions of memories, times and emotions that may serve us (readers) to connect with other details in subsequent parts of the book. For instance, if we skipped the reading of the chapter in which Tita discovered a new system of communication with Pedro by means of meals, allowing her sister Gertrudis to be the medium, “the conducting body through which the sexual message was passed onto Pedro” (Esquivel 52), it would be more difficult for us to understand why Gertrudis was the first guest to feel the symptoms of love through flashes of sexual passion, “by recognizing the heat in her limbs” after tasting the cake at Esperanza’s wedding – the event narrated in the last chapter of the book.
Indeed, love is an important feature of the fantastic literature, which also connects to the meanings of life and death (Todorov 75). Logic and reason applied to the mysteries of human passions have been reductive, inducing love to become a fugitive category in the world (Nochimson 34). Love navigates the mysteries that make life fruitful, as Nochimson says, even if it itself has to die in doing so. Tita has this revelation when she sees Pedro staring at her body while she was grinding almonds and sesame seeds in the kitchen (Esquivel 67). The narrator describes Tita’s perception of the scene: “Tita knew how a soul that hasn’t been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour” (Esquivel 67). Todorov argues that, in many cases, the supernatural exists to give us an idea of powerful sexual desires and to introduce us to the realms of life after death (75). In a similar train of thought, Faris says: “We experience the closeness of two realms, two worlds that converge at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (21). The replenishing vision of rebirth, Faris continues, emerges after an encounter with death, making the heroes of magical realist novels rise, fall, and transform literally and magically in response to cosmic forces beyond their control (137-138). Lois Parkinson declares that by universalizing the individual self, magical realist texts can make us become familiar with the presence of ghosts within them (498). In magical realist texts, “the realms of the dead and living reflect one another, are penetrable, permeable, mutually knowable” (Parkinson 529).
In Like Water for Chocolate, love dies and resurrects in the meals prepared by Tita. Maria Elisa Christie has pointed out, “this is a world in which women inhabit the essence of the foods, smells and flavors,” helping to build love relationships within the most intimate space of the Mexican home: the kitchen (21, 22). The preparation of foods becomes a vehicle through which Pedro and Tita can channel their erotic desires. Tita and Pedro’s love affair simmers constantly throughout the story, but especially in the magical way in which Tita infuses her emotions into the meals she prepares for Pedro, so in consuming them, Pedro ingests Tita’s passion for him as they bide their time waiting for the day when they can consummate their love (Ching, Buckley & Lozano-Alonso 286). In describing the scene in which Tita prepares the dish with the rose petals, the narrator says, “Gertrudis turned to Tita for help, but she wasn’t there even though her body was sitting up quite properly in her chair. Her entire being had dissolved into the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro’s body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous. Pedro let Tita penetrate to the farthest corners of his being”(52). Here it is clear what Zubiaurre says, “To cook is to create is to love is to write”(34).
Love as a category of the faculties of the soul (imagination and desire) represents the portrayal of Truth in Esquivel’s novel while traditions and rules produced by the cognitive faculties (reason and understanding) can be seen as the enemy of Truth. Eric S. Rabkin has stated, the fantastic literature is to be used to reveal “the truth of the human heart” which sometimes is conceived as having two natures an evil nature and a good one (27). For Rabkin, the fantastic, which is wholly dependent on reality for its existence, turns reality 180 degrees around to speak of the human heart in a realistic way that astonishes us (28, 41). Thus, the fantastic is nothing but a tool to clarify the inner workings of man’s soul (Rabkin 41).
The opposition between love (desire/imagination) and traditional rules (understanding/reason) is suggested from the beginning in Like Water for Chocolate. The narrator says, “Was she allowed to experience love? Tita knew perfectly well that all these questions would have to be buried forever in the archive of questions that have no answers” (Esquivel 11). Here, the expression “archive of questions that have no answers” refers to the accumulation of traditions and laws that obstruct the fulfillment of love. The following fragment is taken from another page: “Since Tita saw Pedro, she knew she would love him forever (…) But, it wasn’t decent to desire your sister’s future husband” (18, 19). Again, love is confronted by the rational logic imposed by traditional ways of thinking. With regard to the identification between love and truth, Tita’s sister Gertrudis expresses that Tita and Pedro’s love is one of the truest loves she has ever seen. The truth has been kept as a secret but it will come out in time (Esquivel 190).
The character of Mama Elena symbolizes the law –that is the opposite of freedom and imagination. The narrator says, when it came to dividing, dismantling, destroying, or dominating, Mama Elena was a pro. In the novel, it is suggested that Mama Elena had been killing Tita since she was little. Because of her mother’s cold rationality, Tita could not imagine her mother’s mouth with its bitter rictus passionately kissing someone, nor her yellowing cheeks flushed pink from the heat of a night of love. Tita’s imagination is challenged by her own inability to understand that her mother’s behavior arose as a sequel from a frustrated love in her younger years. On the other hand, Mama Elena feels threatened very often by Tita’s desire to love. Esquivel writes, “Mama Elena perceived Tita’s desire to see her vanish from the earth so she would be free to wed. Tita’s desire was a constant presence between them, in every little conversation, in every word, in every glance” (133). Yet, Tita does not openly confront the law until the moment Mama Elena’s ghost appears before her. As she herself recognizes, there are few people prepared to fulfill their desires whatever the cost, and that the right to determine the course of one’s own life would take more effort than she had imagined (Esquivel 168).
Tita reacts to the law in secret by becoming a creator of imaginative flavors (tastes), even though she is subject to endure the coldness of a rational recipe. Maite Zubiaurre suggests that the lonely reclusion, severe discipline, and hermetic intellectual pursuit of the cook/sorcerer Tita can not be avoided (40). But, Tita manages to let herself play with the combinations of foods. Esquivel writes, “For Tita the joy of living was wrapped up in the delights of food. It wasn’t easy for a person whose knowledge of life was based on the kitchen to comprehend the outside world” (7).
Here are two faculties involved: understanding and knowledge. By reading Esquivel’s passage, we notice that Tita can not have access to the world outside her kitchen because of her inability to understand how that world works, that is, its laws and the ways in which she is supposed to experience them. Another interesting passage that suggests the importance of these faculties is when Tita finds out that Pedro, the love of her life, would marry her sister Rosaura. She couldn’t sleep neither could she find the words for what she was feeling. Esquivel writes: “How unfortunate that black holes in space had not yet been discovered, for then she might have understood the black hole in the center of the chest, infinite coldness flowing through it” (16).
Tita finds refuge in the kitchen, where she could express her feelings imaginatively by means of food. The kitchen becomes a site that combines knowledge (of foods, ingredients), desire (for Pedro), and imagination (freedom to escape from the rules, recipes, traditions). The kitchen is, according to Lucas Dobrian, a veritable reservoir of creative and magical events, in which Tita performs as an artist, healer, and lover (Dobrian 60, Zubiaurre 35). In this sense, culinary activity involves not only the combination of prescribed ingredients but something personal and creative emanating from the cook, a magical quality which transforms the food and grants it powerful properties that go beyond physical satisfaction to provide spiritual nourishment as well (Dobrian 60, Zubiaurre 35).
Such spiritual nourishment is represented in various instances of the novel, linked to the preparation and consumption of meals. When Pedro gives Tita roses to thank her for being a great cook, she prepares “a prehispanic recipe involving rose petals.” By the time she started elaborating the meal, the roses, which had been initially pink had turned quite red from the blood that was flowing from Tita’s hands and breasts (Esquivel 48). Tita’s happiness and her love for Pedro again become the magical ingredients in the recipe. Maria Elisa Christie has affirmed that is of a common knowledge that “the cook must be happy and filled with love in the elaboration of Mexican dishes” (24). Pedro experiences a sublime feeling when he tastes Tita’s food. Esquivel describes the following scene: “When Pedro tasted his first mouthful, he couldn’t help closing his eyes in voluptuous delight and exclaiming: It is a dish for the gods!” There is so much pleasure involved in his tasting of the food that Pedro’s imagination suffers a profound black out in trying to go beyond all its possibilities, and he tries to rationalize what is going on in his mouth by closing his eyes. As Pedro discovers his own inability to figure it out, that is to logically explain what he feels, the man liberates himself from the unpleasant pressure reason and imagination exercise upon him, saying: “It is a dish for the gods!”
What is the mystery of Tita’s recipes? In Like Water for Chocolate, food turns into a surrogate for (or vehicle to transmit) love, desire and other emotional states. It is an ordinary component of everyday life that reaches supernatural (spiritual/mental) connotations in the novel. During the preparations for Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding, for instance, Tita cries her heart out into the bowl of meringue icing, making all the people who taste the wedding cake be overcome with an intense longing about their lost loves (Esquivel 35-39). Esquivel writes: “The moment they took their first bite of cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing, sobbing and crying. The weeping was just the first symptom of intoxication –an acute attack of pain and frustration. Everyone fell under the spell and joined the collective vomiting that was going on in the patio” (39). Later, the narrator says that Tita was never able to convince her mother that she had only added one extra ingredient to the cake, the tears she had shed while preparing it (Esquivel 41).
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